Pupperazzi is a lovely and endearing game in which you take photographs of dogs.
The gameplay loop is straightforward: complete goals by taking images. Make money and get fans by doing so. Purchase fresh photographic equipment and repeat the process.
The longer you play Pupperazzi, the more of the world opens up to you, allowing you to earn additional goodies.
While this appears to be a nice idea on the surface, it is not. Unfortunately, the execution is not the same.
Pupperazzi seemed intriguing to me as a fan of independent games and as a creative individual on the lookout for something fresh and entertaining to play.
With that being stated, I’m sorry to announce that Pupperazzi is a total and utter disaster.
When I first booted up the game, I was confronted with a tutorial that skipped messages and buttons that did not operate when I was instructed to use them. That’s when I discovered another button that performed the same function as the first one. I observed that the controls had a noticeable movement delay; for example, the left stick to walk around would take a good bit of time to move me around, the right stick used to glance about might move at a snail’s pace or far too quickly. This was consistent, and I was only able to glance about as quickly as the game felt like I could rather than as quickly as I could input. At one point, I discovered a setting in the settings that improved things, but my cam aiming button began to cause me to crouch, changing the game from having just one choice to do it from the start to having three possibilities owing to the button that had previously not worked now functioning properly.
It wasn’t until I watched a film of myself playing that I realized I was unable to see around while pointing my camera at some points. At other times, the game would crash on me, causing me to lose all of the images I had taken before I could utilize them to earn rewards.
Using gold bones, you may purchase or rent stuff from a shop (renting items is free, but purchasing new cam gear costs bones.) This was OK until I decided to rent a ball to toss for the dogs, at which point a longstanding issue with the game became a huge problem that I haven’t mentioned until now. You are unable to look all the way down to pick up items. Most of the time, this isn’t a problem because the items you photograph are within reach whether you’re standing or kneeling, but picking up some smaller items, and occasionally larger ones, can become a difficulty when you can’t glance down to even see what you’re trying to pick up.
The dogs are the most enjoyable aspect of this game; after all, it is about dogs! However, unfortunately, they are not enough to redeem this game from its many flaws.